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Industrial hemp is a crop that has the potential to lower the environmental impacts of textile production, empower small-scale farmers and create jobs in a wide variety of industries. Two non-profit groups, Fibershed and Growing Warriors, are working to reintroduce industrial hemp into Kentucky—and eventually U.S. agriculture. Dan Malloy and a small film crew from Patagonia paid a visit to farmer and military veteran Michael Lewis to see how it was going.

On July 4, 2016, a petition will be delivered urging Congress to pass the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2015/2016 (S.134 and H.R. 525) legalizing the cultivation of industrial hemp in the United States. We invite you to learn more and take action at the National Hemp Association.

Patagonia’s $20 Million & Change fund was launched in 2013 to help innovative, like-minded startups bring about solutions to the environmental crisis and other positive change through business. Or, in Yvon’s words, to help entrepreneurs and innovators succeed in “working with nature rather than using it up.” Today, we’re introducing you to one of those companies, Bureo, a fellow B Corporation and member of 1% for the Planet.

From his cabin in Cocholgüe, Ben Kneppers can see the ocean. An American entrepreneur from Cape Cod, Ben is an unlikely resident of this small coastal community in the south of Chile. He is a co-founder of Bureo, an innovative company that transforms discarded fishing nets into recycled products. In Chile, Ben works on the ground overseeing Bureo’s Net Positiva initiative, the recycling program that is the foundation of their business. Through Net Positiva, Bureo facilitates the collection of discarded nets to obtain the raw materials necessary to manufacture sunglasses and sidewalk cruiser skateboards while simultaneously reducing plastic pollution.

On a far from average Wednesday, we arrived to work at Patagonia Seattle for a morning meeting led by brand responsibility analysts, Paul Hendricks and Logan Duran, from the Ventura headquarters. Reviewing the multiple types of environmentally responsible materials in our products (e-fibers), the use of third-party auditing for environmental performance standards and our ongoing environmental campaign efforts is a valuable reminder that our company is in a higher league of environmental responsibility.

Above: The Bullitt Center in Capitol Hill, Seattle. All photos by Charles Clark and Jacqueline Sussman.

Every year, we look back on the year that was—and every year, we’re deeply thankful for your support of our mission and your willingness to stand for nature in all its fullness and beauty. May the peace and joy of the holiday season be with you and your loved ones, and here’s to a bright New Year ahead.

This holiday season, I have an early New Year’s resolution for the sake of Planet Earth: let’s all become radical environmentalists.

This sounds like a big leap—but it’s not. All you need is a sewing kit and a set of repair instructions.

As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer. This simple act of extending the life of our garments through proper care and repair reduces the need to buy more over time—thereby avoiding the CO2 emissions, waste output and water usage required to build it.

In 1998 the Yankees swept their 24th World Series, Vice President Al Gore symbol­ically signed the Kyoto Protocol and two Stanford Ph.D. candidates established a little company called Google. It was also the year former Patagonia SoHo employees Aaron Petz and Teal Akeret, along with three other young activists, scaled the 250-foot Parachute Jump tower in Coney Island. Their goal? To hang a banner that read “NYC Parks Dept. Stop Killing Rainforest for Boardwalks & Benches.” It would go down as a highly effective grassroots operation to speak out for the Brazilian rainforest.

Editor’s note: Today we’re happy to share an excerpt from Living & Breathing: 20 Years of Patagonia in New York City, a commemorative book about our double-decade relationship with the Big Apple. Grab a printed copy at one of our four NYC stores or check out the digital version at the end of this post.

In the conventional model of philanthropy, the big funders—corporations and foundations—mainly support big professional environmental groups. The large national organizations (those with budgets over $5 million) are doing important work but they make up just 2% of all environmental groups, yet receive more than 50% of all environmental grants and donations.

Meanwhile, funding the environmental movement at a grassroots level—where change happens from the bottom up and lasts—has never been more important. But these groups continue to be woefully underfunded.

Update: The majority of this post first appeared on March 6, 2015. It has been updated here with the most recent information about Patagonia’s work to improve chemical safety in our supply chain.

Patagonia—as well as other high-quality outdoor outerwear suppliers—for years relied on a Durable Water Repellent (DWR) of a certain chemistry (described below) to bead up, then disperse, surface moisture from rainwear. It is necessary, even in a waterproof jacket, to prevent surface saturation. A soggy surface creates a clammy, wet-feeling next-to-skin climate even where water does not actually penetrate the surface. The DWR we used as a standard for years was a long-chain (C8) fluorocarbon-based treatment that is highly effective and extraordinarily durable. Unfortunately, its by-products are toxic and persist in the environment, a combination that makes it unacceptable despite its excellent performance. Governments around the globe have now required chemical companies to stop making C8 DWR, so every high-quality outerwear supplier has been searching for alternatives of comparable performance.

In the spring of 2015, Patagonia hired me to document a lively traverse across the United States—the Worn Wear tour. The story is as follows.

“What in the heck is that thing you got there?” mutters a middle age lady smoking a cigarette out back of the service station. “It’s a mobile clothing repair wagon,” I tell her. “We’re going around the country fixing folks’ clothes so they don’t have to throw away their favorite jackets.” She looks off into the distance taking in the concept, sweat beading down her forehead—summer came early in East Tennessee. “Well, if I woulda known y’all were coming,” she exclaimed, “I woulda brought down my jeans. The damn knees keep blowing out!”

She takes one last rip and puts out her cigarette. “You know, that’s a good idea you’ve got there. This country could use something like that. We buy so much crap and throw it away.” She gets to her feet. “You all travel safe and keep up the good work. I gotta get back to it.”

“It starts as rain or snow falling on Scotland’s highest mountain—Ben Nevis. Either as rain or melting snow it percolates the thin layer of peat soil until it reaches the granite rock and unable to penetrate it, runs under the surface until emerging in Coire Leish or Coire na Ciste. The outflows from these two mountain lochans, located well over 3000’ above sea level, make their way spilling over the blue and pink granite rocks of the mountain’s rugged north face until they join together as the Alt a Mhullin continuing on in the valley between Ben Nevis and Carn Mor Dearg.” —Ben Nevis Distillery

These poetic words adorn a bottle of gold-medal whiskey from the oldest legal distillery in Scotland, Ben Nevis—the source of distinguished single malts and the mountain crucible of British alpinism. This is where generations of alpinists, whether in wool knickers or Gore-Tex, developed mountain equipment and cut their teeth for expeditions to the great ranges of the world. It’s a place renowned for terribly stormy weather and long approaches to “short” climbs. It’s a place that honors style and demands an honest Scot’s prudence to climb routes only in “full” wintry conditions. It’s where Yvon Chouinard visited over 40 years earlier to test himself on Scotland’s hardest routes and compare the performance his own curved-pick Chouinard Zero ice tool with the angled-pick design of his Scottish contemporary, Hamish MacInnes. And it’s where Walker Ferguson, responsible for field testing all of Patagonia’s most technical products, has brought us to be guinea pigs with our own latest prototypes.